By this time, Mott had six German refugees working in his department, and he knew he could get tenure for only three. He decided that Fuchs should be one of the ones to go, partly because he had completed his research project.
The normal next step would be a teaching post, but Mott felt that Fuchs was too uncommunicative to be a good teacher. So he wrote to Max Born, one of the greatest German physicists of the 1930s diaspora, whom he had known at Göttingen and who was now at Edinburgh University, recommending Fuchs for a research post. Born accepted him and, after a brief farewell to Bristol, the Gunns and Mott, Fuchs moved north to the Scottish capital.
Born took to Fuchs; he found him, as he recalled later, ‘a very nice, quiet fellow with sad eyes’. They became friends, although Fuchs maintained his reserve and Born was aware that he knew nothing of Fuchs’s private thoughts. He also found him gifted as a mathematical physicist, and enlisted him in projects in several different areas of theoretical physics. They published two papers together in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, ‘The Statistical Mechanics of Condensing Systems’ and ‘On Fluctuations in Electromagnetic Radiation’; Fuchs proudly sent these to his father in Germany. Fuchs and Born also published another paper in an academic journal, ‘The Equation of State in a Dense Gas’. Fuchs’s professional status was enhanced by the coupling of his name with Born’s in these papers. He also earned a further degree at Edinburgh University, that of Doctor of Science.
He was a little less of a loner than he had been at Bristol. He came to be on friendly terms with two others in the physics department, and saw quite a lot of them: Hans Kellerman, another young German refugee who had an open, easy-going manner that was quite different to Fuchs’s own, and an idiosyncratic, highly strung young American, Edward Corson. Fuchs exchanged letters with the Gunns, and Ronald Gunn wrote him a long letter about his views on free will and determinism.
He kept the letters that the Gunns wrote to him. He kept most of the personal letters that anyone wrote to him. In 1950 he had some 250 letters he had received over the years. It was as if, with his limited human contact, he wanted these tangible signs of the contact that he did have.
The years at Bristol and Edinburgh were Fuchs’s twenties, a decade for most people in which they develop an adult personality, acquire a direction, embark on a career, learn to relate to other people, particularly to the opposite sex, and acquire lasting friendships. At the end of the decade Fuchs was well established in a career, but he was only beginning to find a way to relate to other people, or to rediscover a way, after the break in his life when he left Germany. He had no close relationships with women and, in personality terms, his principal achievement was learning to live without other people rather than learning to live with them. He had established a moat between his own emotional life and those of others, and he was building his life on one side of it.
In Edinburgh, he also carried out one more service for the German Communist Party. Kuczynski organized the sending of Communist leaflets to Germany. Fuchs played a part in this, posting some of the leaflets.
In August 1939, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. This was a shock to friends of the Soviet Union. Some could not stomach it. Many Communists found the news shattering but most, after discussing it among themselves, concluded that it was a justifiable tactical manoeuvre, because, with Britain and France refusing to join Russia in a united front against Germany, Russia had to buy time. Fuchs also was shocked, more so than most because he had joined the Communist Party precisely to fight against Nazism. He thrashed this over in his own mind, and worried about it without the give-and-take of discussion with other people. He also concluded eventually that it was justified.
Three months later Russia took another move that affronted many of its friends: it invaded Finland, in order to seize the strategically important area of Karelia. This time, Fuchs allowed himself the luxury of defending Russia openly, in a discussion with Born, arguing that the invasion was a defensive measure in preparation for the war which Russia expected.
Fuchs applied for British citizenship in August 1939. But the following month war broke out, and as a German he became an enemy alien, so his application was set aside. A system of classification of enemy aliens was set up, dividing them into A, B and C categories. C meant that they were not likely to be a security risk and were not to be subject to any restrictions; eighty per cent of the 50,000 Germans in Britain, most of them Jewish refugees, were put into this category. Everyone had to appear before a tribunaclass="underline" when Fuchs was summoned, Born wrote to the tribunal assuring them that Fuchs had been a member of the Social Democratic Party in Germany between 1930 and 1932, and Fuchs himself told them that he was a sincere anti-Nazi. He was given a C classification.
This was the period of the so-called phoney war, in which there was very little fighting. Some newspapers speculated that Germany would collapse economically and the war would be over soon. Then, suddenly, everything changed. In May and June 1940 the German armies overran Belgium, Holland and France with bewildering speed, and positioned themselves on the shores of the English Channel. Britain was faced with invasion, by an enemy that had shown itself to be terrifyingly efficient at fighting a war. In the atmosphere of alarm, wild rumours went around of spies and saboteurs; exaggerated accounts were published of the activities of fifth columnists on the Continent and their contribution to the German victory. In particular, there were stories from Holland of Germans who had posed as refugees from Nazism but had turned out to be secret agents helping the advancing German armies. The War Office demanded that all enemy aliens be interned immediately as a precautionary measure.
One morning in late June, a policeman appeared at Fuchs’s door and told him to pack some things and come to the police station. Within hours he was on his way, along with thousands of others, to a hastily organized internment camp on the Isle of Man. He did not even have a chance to let Born know he was not coming in to work. Kellerman was picked up on the same day.
Fuchs’s sojourn on the Isle of Man was brief, for measures were already being taken to transport enemy aliens further away from the war zone, to places where they could do no harm, in Canada and Australia. On 3 July Fuchs boarded the liner Ettrick in Liverpool, bound for Quebec. His fellow passengers were some 1,300 other internees from the Isle of Man, 750 German prisoners of war and 400 Italian prisoners of war. Another liner, the Arandora Star, had sailed three days earlier flying a swastika below the Red Ensign to let the Germans know she was carrying prisoners of war, but she was torpedoed and sunk twenty-four hours after leaving port. The Ettrick set sail also with a swastika flag and Red Ensign, but then the news of the Arandora Star's fate was received and it was realized that this provided no protection, so the Ettrick returned to Liverpool, and sailed the following day in a convoy, with a destroyer escort.
The crossing was uncomfortable and the arrival unpropitious. As often happened in wartime, the prisoners of war were treated better than the internees, because the prisoners of war were under the protection of the Geneva Convention and their treatment was governed by its rules, whereas the Government was answerable to no one and no set rules in its treatment of internees. The internees were kept in the hold and had to stay below decks for the whole journey. The sea was rough and many people were sick, and there was also an outbreak of diarrhoea. Most of them recall the crossing as a nightmare.